by J. D. Landis
I’m amused to find myself thinking of Clara’s bottom. There is probably no happier sign of her influence upon me than that my mind should concoct a play on words to lead me from my admittedly endless, frequently metaphoric, rumination on her meaning in my life to visions of her tight yet bouncy ass. I, who have seen so few asses in my time, and most of those in advertisements in her magazines, cannot imagine there is any that compares to hers. How, I wonder, could anyone be so captivated by those perky globules of fat that, putting aside their cushional and excremental functions, would seem to serve no purpose except, perhaps, to amuse? But what a world they are, unto themselves, soft and hard, big and small, manifest and inscrutable. And what they do with light! Simply by lying prone there on the bed, still and naked on a late-summer day like this one, as day fades to night, she teaches me to see how shadow is God’s paint and the picture never done. The golden fuzz is brushed aside, the texture rendered eggshell pure but for a moment, when the consequence of darkness proves the subtlety of lust. I am drawn to touch, a sculptor, even I with these crude hands, but while she yields, she also bounces back. There is nothing I, or anyone far more divine, could do to fashion something more comfortably enticing. But it is wholly for admiration, not penetration. I shall not have to perform the ten days’ bread-and-water penance decreed a thousand years ago by Bishop Burchard of Worms for having one’s wife “retro canino.” She will reach around to finger me like a flute along the narrow of her ass. Yet once she arches up and aims me, it’s toward the moister, softer, more modestly cucullated hole. Thus we get to do the dance while wearing looser shoes. And what a sight it is, to hold her bottom in my hands and gaze up along the river of her spine and see her shoulders twitch and neck slither and head grind the pillows. Her hair’s her face and thus expressionless, though still it says so much. Its very anonymity arouses me, and so primitive too it seems, fucoid in its swing and even in its reddish-olive coloring. Also different are the sounds she makes, more guttural, deeper, fundamental, mimicking this assward view of life and urgent in their calling to this unseen man behind her, whoever she might imagine him to be. I box her behind in my hands and push and pull her up and down, or is it back and forth, upon myself, and the view I have is unparalleled, panoptic, all of her and all of me until I disappear and she groans, “More.”
But instead of her before me it’s her Week-at-a-Glance. I still can’t bear to look. And so I think instead of the absurdity of this, week-at-a-glance, and remember how on the day we met she pronounced my otiant life refreshing in contrast to all those others for whom time is best compressed and her beloved quilts some talismans of contemplation. I could probably get rich, I think—or richer, for the small need I have of money even in this most lucripetous of cities—by issuing Life-at-a-Glance, the perfect little datebook for the active man and woman to remind them how fugacious are their unreflective lives. How strange, I realize, that I then should have ended up a sensualist, knee-deep, and deeper still, ball-deep at least, brain-deep, yes, in what only the uninitiated think is fleeting. Marriage is eternal, and so must be its pleasures, all.
I start at the beginning of the week and see, in her mangled handwriting, which only I can read, some things I know and some I don’t: she’s eaten lunch out twice; she’s reminded herself to have her teeth cleaned; she’s leg-pressed some fifty times-plus more than what I weigh, which makes me smile; her period is late; her estimated tax is due today; she means to buy some lobster, perhaps to celebrate the end of summer, some six days from now, and I think I must then chill an old Climens, the full 750 ml, thereby to guarantee enough to take with us to bed, for nothing sweetens up a kiss like that unless it is vin santo; she’s had to have, unseasonably, her air conditioning serviced; she’s sold four quilts and bought two more; and now, tonight, right now, she’s …
Nowhere, it would seem.
It’s blank.
There’s nothing there.
An empty space where there’s an empty space.
It’s as if my wife has stepped off the page and disappeared, like some character in a book who’s killed off without warning.
Or perhaps she never left.
“Clara,” I say, but this time not to a pillow. “Clara,” I repeat.
If she’s here, she doesn’t answer.
I look at her Week-at-a-Glance again. But I’ve made no mistake. There is nothing written down for this evening. No name, no place, no time, no words.
It’s blank. And what a strange and empty kind of silence this is. I would much prefer some man’s name there and news she’ll raise her skirt and rend her little pants to him, to this. I may be fool, but I have never worried losing her to someone else. Perhaps I have too little experience in these things. Perhaps I should assume the passion of a marriage cannot be contained and women dash like squirrels through the world in search of nuts to rest their chins upon.
Besides, I thrive on images of her in ecstasy. One’s wife, particularly one so ophelimitous, deserves the universal cock. And every husband worthy of the word will serve it up.
But Clara be untrue?
The question has no meaning. No matter what she does, she’s true, for I accept her as she is. What else is marriage but such approbation? It has no greater truth.
But if she’s nowhere, then she can’t exist.
I wonder if I’ve dreamt her. Might I still be a man alone who doesn’t speak except within his head and even there says nothing true?
What if I don’t exist myself? It feels I don’t. Is this what it means when people say, “Without you I am nothing”?
But if I don’t exist, then why this emptiness? Since when can nullity be palpable?
Or is this blankness yet another of her codes? Has she left me? Is she hiding? Has the Earth itself dissolved and I float here in the whiteness of this piece of page?
I close and drop the datebook on the bed and listen to my voice: “Clara.”
Nothing.
“Clara.”
The same.
I go in search of her.
FIRST HER BATHROOM, where I don’t really expect to find her—or, in fact, any evidence of her whereabouts—but which I’ve always wanted an excuse to visit. I’ve not set foot within this necessary, as they call it up north from whence hails our Star of Bethlehem, since I stood here with our architect and contractor and watched a muscular young man titivate these tiles by chafing microscopic specks of grout with sandpaper so smooth it might as well be chamois. I’ve never run from images of life’s necessities as they might be required of, or practiced by, my wife. Defecation, for all its fetid honks, is both sensual and cleansing, and Clara is not so verecund that she won’t sit there with this door open and her elbows on her knees and address me standing at the door concerning this or that while in its midst. I hope that someday I shall stand at her feet in a delivery room and watch her open like a rose and, my bride and grume, spill forth the juice and blood of love and life. I have no fear of, or even distaste for, these bodily matters. Clara has taught me to accept the flesh. To do so is to find the way to heal the mind. There is no other. We are so beautifully constructed. Accept the flesh. Accept your limits. Love your mother.
Right now I must accept the fact that Clara’s gone. Or at least not here in her bathroom.
I even pull aside the curtain of her bathtub, hesitantly, because I cannot help but see behind it what most I fear: her body drowned or bludgeoned, naked in her death. I have never understood why we flood ourselves with images of destruction. I am not a superstitious man. I don’t believe I ward off fearful things by imagining them first. And yet I greet with considerable relief her bathtub empty, so much so that I sit down upon its lip and open each and every container she has lined up on its inner rim, shampoos, conditioner, bath salts, an uncorked, hand-blown, never-opened bottle of La Baignoire Graminaceous Foam Bath I had ordered for her by mail two years ago, and, in a box, lozenges that smell as if she’s given them her scent.
Missing her intensely, I put ea
ch thing back precisely as I found it, rise, and look down into her bidet. I try to see my reflection in the slightly moist porcelain, yet I see nothing but a hair, a lonely, curly, lovely, precious little hair, fallen from my darling and, like me, most sad to be apart from her. I nearly pick it up, but then I think, You’re identifying with a pubic hair. I laugh and try to blow the thing away, but it sticks, it waits, like me.
I’ve been told that people love to look in other people’s medicine cabinets. It’s like looking through their skin, behind their masks, an expiscatory search beneath the surface of their lives for what can only be their weaknesses, their maladies, addictions, their suffering. And of course there might be pills to steal, those that slow you down or bring you sleep the most popularly pilfered, according to Clara, who continues to maintain, in her indirect justification of this lentitudinous life her husband leads, that what the sedulous truly seek is rest, is peace, is tranquil contemplation of the truth.
There are no such pills here. There are no grand discoveries to make of some disease or pain that she would hide from me. Only some expired Tylenol, generic calcium carbonate whose use I’m sure she keeps from me because it’s occasioned solely by my cooking, and Midol for her menstrual cramps, a recent malady and one whose intensity, though brief, is quite severe and which I try to soothe from her by rubbing gently on her stomach while we listen to Julian Bream play Silvius Leopold Weiss and talk of anything but the pleasures of pareunia.
I am about to close the cabinet when I see a strange container that’s shaped rather like a toilet seat. Its color reminds me most of the soft peach light from my mother’s spelter lamp that bathed a nameless girl and me that night four years ago when first she taught me how to see her love herself and me to love myself and let her watch.
I open it and find a ring of empty, wizened plastic bubbles surrounding a dial imprinted with the days of the week. I count the days and find that each comes thrice. Twenty-one days. Three weeks.
A Duane Reade, of all the provincial purveyors, prescription slip pasted to the inside top prescribes one tablet daily. The drug is, as is required, named: Ortho-Novum.
The ortho I know best is orthography, which is usually used to refer to proper spelling but whose antonym is cacography, a splendid word whose first meaning has not to do with spelling but bad handwriting. I would have thought, then, that Clara, to cure her own case of this malodorous Kraut und Rüben, might in fact be taking Caco-Novum. But no, it’s Ortho-Novum, which, according to the description provided on a flimsy slip of paper by the Ortho Pharmaceutical Corporation, consists of norethindrone and ethinyl estradiol.
I should know from the “estra” what I’m dealing with here. But I read on and learn that these are contraceptives, which, the Ortho Pharmaceutical Corporation informs me, have a failure rate of less than l percent.
I wonder whose they are until I read Clara’s name above her gynecologist’s, Dr. Leslie, on the prescription slip pasted to the cover of this ghastly device.
They are hers. Or were. All twenty-one of them, three weeks’ worth, leaving seven days in which to bleed without meaning and thus complete the lunar month that so attaches women to the heavens.
The instructions from the Ortho Pharmaceutical Corporation confirm this: “After you have taken your last tablet, wait for seven days. During these seven days your period should begin.”
Clara is obviously clocking these matters. She notes within her Week-at-a-Glance that her period is late. But her periods don’t last seven days. I should know. During them we limit sex to mouths and fingers, though less for the sake of fastidiousness than variety. And sometimes, when she is bleeding or, as happened on one occasion, when she was diagnosed by her gynecologist to have an infection and was kind enough to put aside her shyness to so inform me, we abstain altogether—taking a breather, as this might so aptly be called. Can she possibly expect to bleed with the very dawning of the day after she’s pushed the final pill from out the back of this peculiar pink contraption? Punctilious indeed.
What to make of this? She takes them not to have a child, or should I say, falsely chiastic once again, to not have a child.
But is it mine she doesn’t want or someone else’s? Better the latter. I’d rather the squelching of a child of mine be inadvertent than purposeful, even if this means she is untrue.
But I have recently determined that Clara cannot be untrue.
So what is happening here?
I don’t know where my wife is.
And now I don’t know if I know my wife.
I feel her gone. At the same time, I feel her leaving me, not merely in the usual way a wife leaves a husband but leaving me, emptying out from me, as if I had contained her but now she leaks away.
Is this what marriage is, the containment of the other, the inhabiting of one another’s being, and when one leaves, the other one’s as vacant as an empty house?
But this is what I wanted! To see her. Apart from me. Out there, naked and unmasked.
I know just where to look.
THE DOOR TO her closet is not locked. I reach for the knob the way one does after tredding on carpets in winter. But I feel no shock. Only excitement. I am not supposed to be here. This is forbidden.
I am in. Today’s clothes lie on the floor at the portal. I see that the underpants she put on to go out were fresh.
Where to begin? My wife’s closet is like her little house, a place her life resides no matter where she’s gone. I stand here at its entrance and suffer what we rhetoricians call aporia. As language first and foremost seeks the truth, or should, no matter how disquieting the truth may be, I do the same.
It’s her diaries I’m after, but I don’t know where they are, and now I feel she’s written on each and every object in this place.
It smells of her in here, her skin, her hair, the sweet breeze of her breath. I love her clothes and touch them where they hang. I shut my eyes and feel her in them and miss her terribly.
Her shoes, like mine, show little wear. But I go nowhere, and she is gone all day, my emissary to the world. So is she made of air? Or do the earth and pavement cradle her and not exact their normal toll? And might time do the same? Will I not get to see her old and shrunk and white and frail? I want her aged, in time. I want to see her close enough to see her change, and changed, I even want, as perhaps did Louis Althusser his own beloved wife, to see her dead, to know that part of her, to have her all, though I would also like to die before her, so I won’t die of missing her. So I won’t feel the way I’m feeling now.
I would dig my way through the wet, wormy earth to lie with her again.
But I want her on that bed out there. I want her back. And she has left me. I am here in her closet with her clothes within my arms and my lips upon the bottoms of her shoes as if to glue her to my face.
I look through everything and find no diary. My fingers spider through her drawers. My hands raise dusty mist in the dark corners where they come upon the green, etched bottle that she’s seemed to’ve saved from our first blessed night together in this place. My eyes leap from box to box and smart from mothball gas. This is archeology in pursuit of my own lost civilized self.
And now, once I’ve dug in everything and overturned each shard of Clara’s broken life, I see, in absolute plain sight, piled across a table near the entrance to her closet, some scraps of quilt and each one covering a notebook.
I would like to think they’ve crept themselves from out some kame to mock my excavations, but I realize they were sitting here all the while, in plain sight, unhidden, to be near at hand for Clara to put down her days at night and waiting there for me as well to read upon a night like this when I was left alone, when I was left, when I had nothing left.
I chuckle at the mockery of it—you dig until you bleed to ascertain the meaning of your life and then find out the truth is written on the back of your hand.
There are so many of these little books, each one quilted, no seeming order to their jumble. I touch
one for the first time since the day I found one in the gutter and remember handing it to her and feeling her touch me through it. The memory of it now arouses me even more than the actuality of it then. Each time I touch her, no matter how many times, my desire to touch her yet again grows stronger. Love accumulates even as it is expressed and spent. As if that weren’t paradox enough, it also tells me this: we have reached perfection together on the very night she has disappeared off the page of our common life.
I pick up one of the thin books. It’s covered with a piece of a quilt called Cross in the Square. I look into it. Her unthirlable hand opens to me once again. The pricks of her twisted letters scratch my eyes. I jump into the middle of her life, wherever that might be, for nothing here is dated, she merely lies across the pages, and start to read.
I go through periods when there’s a piece of my body missing. It’s not a limb or an organ. It’s something that doesn’t exist but that I need back. Orgasms rip me apart. They put me back together. But I don’t want to have them alone. I need someone to watch me.
Tonight there were 2 of them.
Ron I’ve been with before.
Ron talked me into this. He said, “I want my friend to see you.”
“See me what?”
I knew what he meant. But Ron didn’t know how to say it. Men are not good with words.
“I told him you
The door chimes. I throw down the book. It falls among its sisters, closed. I turn off the lights in her closet. Then I turn them on again. I’ve lost my place! Which book is it? A hundred scraps of quilt stare up at me.
She’s at the door. And yet I’d rather read her words than hear her voice. I want my silence back.
The door chimes.
Why is she ringing her own bell?
